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Past Issues January 2006 Children who want high test scores should get themselves rich parents
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By George N. Schmidt Q: What is the best way to ensure that your child’s scores on the college entrance examinations (the ACT and SAT) are as high as possible? A: Be wealthy, the wealthier the better. The latest data compiled by the two major corporations that oversee the college entrance “standardized” testing of more than thee million high school seniors in the USA confirms what has already been known for more than a quarter century: Family wealth and income are the most consistent correlation to student test scores on the standardized tests that are commonly used for college admissions. For the 20th year in a row, family income and family wealth provide the best preditive information on how a high school student will score on the prestigious ACT and SAT tests. The SAT and ACT are still widely required as part of the college admissions process, although they are being downplayed in college admissions as the critique of multiple-choice computer-scored “standardized” tests grows. Fair Test (the National Center for Fair and Open Testing) has again compiled the economic data into charts showing how SAT and ACT scores are correlated to family income. The charts below are the results for the class of students who took the ACT and SAT last school year and are now college freshmen. Perhaps as a result of the growing recognition of these facts, the number of colleges requiring the ACT or SAT for admission has been steadily dropping. In December, 2005, Fair Test announced that the total number of colleges that have dropped the test score requirement for adminission has reached 730. The data published here are the results of the latest Fair Test ananlysis of data provided by the ACT and SAT publishers. Last year, the College Board caused a bit of a flap (and some publicity in The New York Times) when it tried to sue Fair Test for “copyright infringement” after Fair Test posted the previous year’s information on its website (www.fairtest.org). After negative media publicity, the College Board withdrew its threat, which had been communicated to Fair Test by attorneys for the College Board. As anyone who understands statistics knows, the fact that there are exceptions to any general statistical reality does nothing to disprove the reality itself. In an era where many people are arguing from anecdotes rather than from evidence, this becomes all the more a problem. In October [www. substance news.com /Mambo/content/view/282/81/] , Substance published an article using the preliminary data from the PSAT tests to show how poorly Chicago did in comparison with wealthier suburbs. Some argued that Chicago was doing well, charging Substance was “racist.” Groups like the Education Trust misuse these data to blame schools, not economic inequity, for the gaps.
Download the Fair Test chart in PDF format |
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